Washington Square

In the genteel New York of the 1840s, Catherine Sloper is the plain, dutiful daughter of Dr. Austin Sloper — a brilliant, fashionable physician who can scarcely conceal his disappointment in her — and the heir to a large fortune. When the handsome, charming, and idle Morris Townsend begins to court her, Catherine falls deeply in love. Her father, reading the young man at a glance, is certain he is a fortune-hunter, and forbids the match on pain of disinheritance.

Washington Square is the most un-Jamesian of Henry James's novels: spare, swift, and edged with an irony so dry it is often compared to Jane Austen. Built like a play — four figures in a few rooms — it watches its heroine grow, slowly and at terrible cost, from the daughter nobody expects anything of into the one person whose judgment the reader comes to trust completely.

At its centre stands Dr. Sloper, one of fiction's great portraits of intellectual cruelty — a man who is right about Catherine's suitor and wrong about everything that matters, treating his daughter's heart as a case to be diagnosed and dismissed. Egged on by her meddling aunt Mrs. Penniman and used by the men around her, Catherine is forced to learn what she is worth on her own terms.

Quiet, unsentimental, and quietly devastating, the novel ends on a note of unbroken dignity that is among the most powerful James ever wrote. It is the classic behind Ruth and Augustus Goetz's play and William Wyler's Academy Award-winning 1949 film, The Heiress.